The Fabulous Mrs. V.

by H. E. Bates

  ‘It rather made me smile, you calling her Broody. What makes you call her that?’

  Aunt Leonora, looking up from cutting saffron cake, which she was placing in slices on small pink china plates that made her almost masculine hands look far larger and clumsier than they really were, said:

  ‘It’s the way she walks. I say she always seems to have a clutch of eggs in her pants.’

  Mr. Elphinstone actually chuckled. You could see that he thought it rather apt. Still chuckling, he accepted a portion of cake from Aunt Leonora, but the chuckle died suddenly on his lips when she said with pungent vehemence:

  ‘Your sister’s an old flap-doodle. She’s the sort of woman who you want to do things to. She seems to forget women are emancipated,’ she said, as if this had anything to do with it.

  If Mr. Elphinstone had any thought of making a loyal and defensive protest about this accusative remark it was utterly useless: Aunt Leonora, in full cry again, gave him no time at all.

  ‘You know what I mean?’ she said. ‘You must have met women you wanted to do things to?’

  A number of interpretations of this interesting theme sprang quickly to my mind and I sensed that they might be springing to Mr. Elphinstone’s too. He sipped at his sherry swiftly and must have been wondering what sort of house he had trespassed into when Aunt Leonora, almost as if in an attempt to save him from further embarrassment said:

  ‘I mean most of them should have been strangled at birth, shouldn’t they? or sterilised or something?’ The mere suggestion of these harsh and unconventional measures made Mr. Elphinstone recoil. ‘I suppose your wives were different, weren’t they?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Is your wife staying with Old Broody too? How do they get on?’

  Mr. Elphinstone, who had been pensively gazing for some moments at a remarkable but useless collection of hunting horns, silver cups, animal claws and such trophies that Aunt Leonora always kept on or over the mantelpiece, now fixed his eyes on a large brass pestle-and-mortar and said that, as a matter of fact, his wife was not with him. She had passed away, he explained, some four or five years before.

  With nothing more than a brusquely consolatory cough Aunt Leonora said she was very sorry to hear it and then turned to me and said ‘Give Mr. Elphinstone some more sherry,’ as if this would do something to help sustain him in his loss.

  ‘What do you feel about the sherry?’ She shot the question at him point-blank, as always, in a sort of bark. ‘Like it?’

  ‘Oh! excellent. Excellent.’

  ‘It’s absolutely awful,’ she said. ‘It’s plain muck. Don’t drink it. We’d have done better to have the red-currant wine. Get the red-currant wine,’ she said to me. ‘We don’t want to poison Mr. Elphinstone, do we?’

  I murmured that that would, perhaps, be rather drastic but I don’t think she really heard.

  ‘Bring the six-year-old,’ she called to me instead, as I went out to the kitchen. ‘That was a good year. I fortified it a bit that year—you can tell the difference.’

  When I came back with the bottle of wine—it was exactly the same brilliant colour as the ripe berries themselves—Mr. Elphinstone was just saying, as he gazed again at the hunting horns:

  ‘I see that you hunt.’

  ‘You don’t see anything of the sort,’ she said. ‘I loathe it.’ She glared at him sternly: her teeth were bared like an open trap. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Oh! no, no, no.’

  ‘I love animals. I adore birds. A pair of fly-catchers arrived yesterday. They always arrive at this time, every year. Are you interested in birds?’

  Mr. Elphinstone confessed that he wasn’t, very, and she glared at him with increasing sternness again. Mr. Elphinstone, who must have felt that he couldn’t seem to manage to say the right thing at all at any time, looked quite nervous, almost shaken, at these constant accusatory glares and I tried to take the edge off things by offering him a glass of wine. He accepted this with eagerness and an upward half-smile, the sort of smile that men often exchange when they feel that women are getting at them, and I half-winked in reply. At this he seemed, I thought, quite comforted.

  ‘And don’t wink,’ she said. ‘What there is to wink about I don’t know.’ Another dark accusative glare followed: ‘It’s always your eyes that give you away.’

  ‘I was merely saying cheers to Mr. Elphinstone,’ I said, ‘only in another way.’

  ‘Well, then say cheers,’ she said, ‘without the appendices.’

  ‘Cheers,’ I said and Aunt Leonora said ‘Cheers’ too, at the same time fixing Mr. Elphinstone with yet another severe glare through her flashing gold spectacles.

  It couldn’t possibly have occurred to Mr. Elphinstone at this time that these constant glares were the inevitable result of her chronic short-sightedness—she simply had to glare in order to see objects at all—or that the very brusqueness of her candour meant that she was very fond of men. Her drastic measures for the proposed extermination of her sex were not accidental; she had been figuratively killing off flap-doodles like Old Broody for years, just as she had been chasing and chastising imaginary hordes of cows and deer from her precious pastures of lupins.

  Just as he must have begun to feel that the consistent barrage of glares was becoming too much to bear she suddenly smiled at him with utter sweetness, the sort of sweetness that only bony, toothy women of her kind can muster, and said:

  ‘Well, what do you think of the wine?’

  Mr. Elphinstone, who clearly wasn’t going to be caught out on the subject of wine a second time, hesitated a moment before collecting his thoughts and then said:

  ‘It’s most refreshing.’

  ‘It’s damn good!’ she barked at him. ‘I’ll tell you that. You won’t get better.’

  ‘I will say it’s unusual. It has a certain quality.’

  ‘No idea where I got the recipe for this from? No? The Black Forest.’ She took a great gulp of wine, rolling it ripely round her tongue. ‘I was on a walking tour there with a girl-friend, years ago. We came to this place not far from Kreuznach, the spa you know, near the Rhine. Just a farmhouse, but we liked it so much we stayed there a month. Splendid place. We got sozzled on this stuff every day.’

  ‘Sozzled?’

  The word sprang from the lips of the surprised Mr. Elphinstone before he could stop it. Sherry and the first half glass of red-currant wine had made his face pinker than ever, so that he looked more and more like a round, sparkling radish freshly washed.

  ‘You don’t need more than a couple of good big glasses,’ she said. ‘It’s far more potent that any of your fancy hocks.’

  Two cuckoos, one chasing the other, both calling as they flew, went sailing over the garden a moment later and Aunt Leonora immediately jumped up and went over to the french windows on the chance of watching them. The midday light was glorious beyond her. The lupins, at their unsullied best, glowed like tremendous candles in the noonday sun.

  ‘Just the day to drink this stuff,’ she told Mr. Elphinstone. ‘Good to be alive. You can taste the berries in it—it’s got that cool sharpness.’

  I accepted this as a signal to fill up the glasses. She held out hers with alacrity but Mr. Elphinstone professed a certain wariness, confessing that he didn’t really drink at lunch-time.

  ‘Good God, man, drink up,’ she said. ‘You’ve nowhere to go, have you?’

  Mr. Elphinstone was bound to say that he hadn’t anywhere to go, particularly, and I took the opportunity of replenishing his glass to the top.

  ‘A zizz in the garden, I suppose?’ she challenged him. Zizz was a favourite word of hers.

  ‘Zizz?’

  ‘Forty winks,’ she said.

  She was still at the french windows, big and dominant against the sun, and suddenly she put her head outside, sniffing significantly.

  ‘Wondering if I could smell the risotto.’

  This remark was nothing less than a piece of low corruption. I knew that it was uttered so
lely as a means of undermining Mr. Elphinstone’s morale and I saw him start distinctly. But much worse was to follow:

  ‘I’ve got cold salmon today,’ she said. As if the remark alone were not enough she gave another of those magnificently sweet, disarming smiles, her voice more airy than usual this time. ‘I suppose I ought to go and make the mayonnaise. Although the fresher it’s made, I think, the better.’

  A confused Mr. Elphinstone took a long drink of wine and then stared for some moments into his glass, clearly torn between departure and a dream of mayonnaise.

  ‘By the way,’ she said suddenly to me, ‘you promised to go and gather the strawberries for me and you never did. Are you going to be a lamb and run down and get them?’

  This was another blatant lie. No word whatever had passed between us about strawberries; I had no idea there were strawberries; but suddenly, on an unexpected and curious tangent of memory, Mr. Elphinstone’s question about Aunt Leonora’s hunting sprang across my mind and I said involuntarily, aloud:

  ‘By Heaven you do.’

  ‘You what?’ she snapped. ‘What was that you said?’

  ‘Nothing, aunt,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking aloud, that’s all.’

  ‘Well then, don’t,’ she said. ‘It’s a bad habit.’ Yet another dark accusative glare followed: ‘It’s even worse than thinking with your eyes.’

  After this I was determined, out of sheer obstinacy, not to hurry the strawberries and I deliberately poured Aunt Leonora, Mr. Elphinstone and myself another glass of wine. As she received hers she said:

  ‘You’ll find a dish in the kitchen. I think they’d look awfully nice in the green one—you’ll see it, the one with the pattern of vine leaves.’

  I ignored this completely and stood sipping wine.

  ‘Strawberries?’ Mr. Elphinstone said. ‘You mean you actually have strawberries already? I say, that’s very early isn’t it?’

  ‘I grew them under cloches,’ she said. ‘You get them three or four weeks early.’

  ‘How wonderful.’ Pinker than ever, Mr. Elphinstone looked at her for the first time with uninhibited if slightly unsteady admiration. A sort of rosy dew had settled on the lower lids of his eyes, like a sparkling distillation of the wine. ‘I think that’s absolutely marvellous.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better go?’ she said to me. ‘It’ll take some little time and I—’

  ‘Just going,’ I said. ‘Enough for how many?’

  ‘Oh! don’t be ungenerous,’ she called to me as I went through to the kitchen. ‘I mean—there are plenty.’

  When I came back from the kitchen garden, twenty minutes later, bearing the dish of remarkably fat ripe strawberries, the sitting-room was empty. But a peal of laughter of Aunt Leonora’s from the kitchen, followed by a short chorus from Mr. Elphinstone, told me where to look.

  In the kitchen Aunt Leonora was coaxing a basin of mayonnaise to its final smoothness and Mr. Elphinstone, now in his shirt sleeves and wearing a kitchen apron with a pattern of large red prawns all over it, was cutting up hard-boiled eggs into neat slices with a wire-cutter. Two glasses of red-currant wine stood on the kitchen table and between them, on a rose-patterned dish, lay a very pleasant-looking portion of cold salmon, pink as Mr. Elphinstone himself, surrounded by sprigs of parsley and palest green circles of cucumber.

  ‘Guess what?’ Aunt Leonora said.

  I guessed at once, and correctly.

  ‘Mr. Elphinstone’s going to stay to lunch,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I rang Broody,’ she said. ‘I asked her too but she felt she couldn’t waste the risotto.’

  This, I was sure, was yet another blatant and scandalous lie and I looked her squarely in the eye about it. In reply she deliberately made her spectacles twitch and turned away in shameless and divine ignorance to her mayonnaise, dipping one little finger into it and then slowly licking it in bemused appreciation.

  ‘If you’ve finished the eggs,’ she told Mr. Elphinstone, ‘you could sugar the strawberries.’ And then to me: ‘Give Mr. Elphinstone some more red-currant. He’s earned another swig.’

  It was a good idea, I thought, for all of us to have another swig, but when I came back from the sitting-room Mr. Elphinstone had disappeared from the kitchen. I couldn’t see him anywhere. Some moments later I observed a figure doing gymnastic exercises of a violent sort beyond the kitchen window. It was Mr. Elphinstone, energetic as any athlete, wildly hurling a clothful of wet lettuce-leaves about his head like an Indian club, spraying drops of water everywhere.

  He came back perspiring deeply, rosier, more radishy than ever.

  ‘Good boy,’ she said sweetly. He beamed. He might actually have been a boy, praised suddenly for some good and sporting deed, and perhaps that was how she saw him, because a moment later she told me:

  ‘We’re going to eat in the garden. It’s just the day. Then afterwards Mr. Elphinstone can lie in the hammock and have a zizz.’

  ‘I must be getting along,’ I said. ‘Is there something else I could do before I go? Will you want another bottle of wine?’

  ‘What do we say?’ she said. There was something devilishly and deliberately familiar about that ‘we’ as she tossed it into the air. ‘Will we want another? I think we will, won’t we?’

  ‘Anything you say!’ Mr. Elphinstone said, laughing with crackling merriment. Really rubicund now, he was tossing lettuce leaves into a glass dish with careless abandonment, rather as if they were useless lottery tickets. ‘Anything you say.’

  ‘I’ll get another,’ I said.

  ‘Magnificent stuff,’ Mr. Elphinstone said. ‘Absolute ambrosia.’

  ‘Don’t forget the gooseberries and the eggs when you go,’ she called after me as I went into the cupboard under the kitchen to get the wine. ‘They’re on the table just outside the french windows. I have heaps. Don’t forget.’

  Having found the wine I couldn’t resist asking, for the last time. if there was anything else I could do.

  ‘What about the hammock?’ I said.

  ‘Oh! it’s up. I used it yesterday. The night was so fine I didn’t bother to take it down.

  ‘What about cushions?’

  ‘You’re awfully dutiful today.’ This was really another dark accusation, deeply shot with suspicion. ‘Oh! Mr. Elphinstone will cope with the cushions, won’t you, Mr. Elphinstone? After all he’s the one who’s going to have the zizz.’

  I took a last look from Aunt Leonora to Mr. Elphinstone. He seemed, I thought, to be having a sort of zizz already. His eyes, now rolling, now dancing, seemed to be like two excited valves bubbling pinkish water. He was actually chewing with rabbity pleasure on the crisp heart of a lettuce, as on a pale green cigar, and his forehead was so covered in perspiration that I fully expected to see it steam

  ‘Well, I’m on my way,’ I said. ‘Don’t go over-eating the strawberries. Have a lovely zizz.’

  ‘Bless you, my boy!’ Mr. Elphinstone called, the lettuce heart dropping suddenly out of his mouth. ‘Hope to see you many times again.’

  I said I hoped so too and went away in rumination across the lawn, past the gold and purple spires of lupins, the ancient Blenheim apple-tree where Aunt Leonora’s hammock hung in shade and finally out through the wicket gate in the hedge over which so many imaginary cows, not to say deer, so often seemed to rear their trespassing horns: quite forgetting, as I did so, to pick up the gooseberries and the eggs.

  It was in fact three hours before I went back to pick them up. By that time, I reasoned, Mr. Elphinstone would long since have gone home to rejoin his sister: Aunt Leonora, if I were lucky, would be indoors, immersed in one of the numberless tasks the masterful energies of an emancipated woman so insatiably demanded, jamming gooseberries, preserving cherries, candying flowers, so that it might be possible for me to sneak in and out again without being mistaken, as Mr. Elphinstone had been, for some trespassing, marauding cow.

  But greatly to my surprise the hammock was still swinging gently to and fro in the deep
shade of the apple tree, with Mr. Elphinstone inside it, having his zizz. In the hot June silence Aunt Leonora was sitting beside him, a protective ash-plant at the ready, her large angular frame uncomfortably perched on a rather small red camp stool, rocking him gently to and fro like a child. The look of drowsy beatitude on her face gave her an air of such protective tenderness that she looked utterly remote from the woman who had so sternly chased him, a few hours before, as a trespasser.

  I was silently escaping down an avenue of raspberry canes when a peremptory wagging of the ash-plant called me back. I was still several yards from the hammock when she recognised me and, in the sternest of low whispers, greeted me with yet another dark accusation.

  ‘What are you prowling about at? Skulking like a tramp. I caught one stealing cabbages off the compost heap the other day.’

  ‘Mr Elphinstone looks remarkably comfortable,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t disturb him,’ she whispered. ‘He’s worn out. He insisted on helping wash up and then actually ran the sweeper over the sitting-room.’ She showered on me the unexpected luxury of a toothy, angular smile. ‘He did love the strawberries. He had four helpings, and then finished up the cream with a boudoir biscuit.’ Mr. Elphinstone stirred suddenly—I could have sworn with the buttonhole of one eyelid very slightly open—and gave the most kittenish of snores before settling back into the luxurious depths of his zizz. ‘He’s had such a good long sleep. Don’t you think he looks just like a child?’

  I didn’t; I thought he looked just like a fat red radish, as in fact he still does.

  I suppose it was inevitable that Aunt Leonora should have married Freddie Elphinstone. I suppose it is inevitable too that she always thinks of herself as the masterful partner, tirelessly energetic in organisation, up at six in the morning, hardly ever at rest, battling ceaselessly with chickens, eggs, the garden and its fruits, repelling idlers, cows and trespassers and still telling, when it suits her purpose, those blatant innocent lies. I suppose too there is a great deal to be said for women of her kind, who feel themselves to be so strong that, out of a sort of powerful charity, they love to take the burden of things off the shoulders of weaker creatures.